With his Oscar-winning animated film Flow, Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis presents a great cinematic experience in which he lets various animals drift through beautiful water worlds on an old sailing boat. On board of the ship are a good-natured Labrador, a sleepy capybara, a thieving monkey and a proud secretary bird. His internationally acclaimed animated film premiered at the Cannes film festival and was awarded Best Animated Film at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. It also beat other animated productions at the European Film Awards, the Golden Globes and the Oscars.
"I don’t want to make dystopian films or realistic dramas with the usual settings. I can invent beautiful natural places or combine elements of real landscapes," explains Gints Zilbalodis. "I don’t just use these natural settings as a background for my films, but they become part of the storytelling, an integral part of the story."
For the filmmaker, it was clear that the story in Flow could only be told as an animated film because of the animals and the camera movements. In Flow, the flood causes a lot of devastation. "Maybe the flood acts as a kind of villain at first, but the animals learn to appreciate the beauty of the flooded areas as the water makes more and more of the world disappear," says the filmmaker. This natural disaster is also something you don’t have to explain to an audience. Everyone knows something like this." He deliberately avoided making the animals behave or think like humans.
For the production of Flow, Gints Zilbalodis used the free animation software Blender "A big advantage of Blender is that it is linked to the real-time rendering software Eevee. Blender and Eevee have allowed me to create many variations, try different camera angles and quickly render the shot to see if it works or not," explains the animation artist. "Blender is also good because we can customize a lot. We created a lot of custom tools for Flow. There were some very talented technicians on the team who created special tools for the film that we could customize whenever we wanted."
Produced as a French-Belgian-Latvian co-production with the support of ARTE, Flow already attracted over 350,000 moviegoers in France. in Latvia we did most of the things. The pre-production of Flow as well as the editing, the animatic, the concept art, the post-production, the lighting, the modeling, the colors, and music took place in Latvia, while the sound and the character animation were done in France and Belgium. “I don’t want to work with a huge studio”, emphasizes Gints Zilbalodis, “because I think with a smaller independent project we can tell more personal stories and tell them with more creative techniques and looks and cinematic languages so I want to kind of stay in this independent world.”
“The time for half-measures and climate denial is over. Unless we move quickly away from fossil fuels, we’re going to destroy the air we breathe, the water we drink, the health of our children, grandchildren and future generations. If we’re going to avoid the worst of the impacts, then we’ve just got to act boldly. And we must act immediately."
Robert Redford
Actor, Director, Producer, Environmentalist
"The media has a powerful role to play in the fight against climate change. Through films, television, and all media outlets, we must continue to deliver the message that solutions are out there and are happening now. We have to make it attractive for people to take action. Movies like Avatar, The Day After Tomorrow, and documentaries like Years of Living Dangerously, which I was proud to be a part of, have been very popular, reaching and inspiring millions of people. And I believe films in particular can really inspire and make people want to take action. It’s great to see some of my film-industry friends working with climate related organizations to push forward those messages."
„It‘s high time to reorganize film production in Germany in a ‚greener‘ and more sustainable way. So far, I am flabbergasted by how much our industry works in environmentally harmful ways.To this very day, it starts with until today one-sided print-outs of scripts, and then it continues with plastic bottles in production offices and lots of plastic waste with every catered meal, and it doesn‘t stop with the limousines that pull up to a red carpet.
For many years, people have sneered at me when I brought my own cup or I declined to eat cheap meat served on paper or plastic plates with plastic knives and forks. It would be great if the Green Shooting Card could change all that.“
Director (Ben X, Time of My Life)
„It’s absolutely great that filmmakers all over the world are trying to clean up their act, and are trying to film as sustainable as we possibly can. Still, I think we shouldn’t underestimate the incredible power of the moving image to also change the hearts and minds of people.
So, apart from trying to be more environmentally aware in our business, I think the big gain lies in how we might make everyone more environmentally aware. Yes, cinema can change the world.
I think filmmakers should start using the powerful weapon in our hands that is the camera.
Let’s not only try to do ‘less bad’. Let’s try to do right, and help drive the change that we all know needs to arrive.“
“We are living in a time in which we can’t afford to behave irresponsibly towards nature. The more important is it that film productions try to work as environmentally friendly as possible. A film team produces every day tons of garbage. I try to avoid using plastic cups on set, I bring my own cup, use ecofriendly cosmetics and avoid needless single rides.”
Photo ® Maddalena Arosio
Darren Aronofsky, Director, Noah / Jury President, 65th Berlin International Film Festival
“When we did Noah we knew we were making a film about the first steward of the earth, so we wanted to be good stewards ourselves. There’s so much waste on film sets. Because of groups like Earth Angel, we were able to change that a little bit.”
"As a TV and film producer I try to incorporate environmental storylines into my projects as much as possible. But it’s just as important, if not more, to ‚go green‘ behind the scenes! Therefore, I help run the Producers Guild of America’s Green Initiative.
We provide resources such as a Best Practices and a Carbon Calculator to help producers green their productions. We also partnered with all the major studios to create www.greenproductionguide.com which is a free green vendor database with over 2,000 vendors offering sustainable production solutions worldwide!"
‚Green screens excepted, we will do everything in our power to be as innovative as we can in order to make our production as green as possible.‘
Photo: (c) herbXfilm Dieter Mayr
Lars Jessen
Director (Fraktus, Dorfpunks, Am Tag als Bobby Ewing starb)
‘It is somewhat embarrassing that green filming is only now becoming an issue in our industry because there have long since been many possibilities to shoot more efficiently.
Technical innovations such as energy efficient lighting are as much a part of this as the awareness of every crew member.’
I do work with a company in the States called Sungevity that leases solar panels to homes. They figured out how to move forward environmentally and how to make it economically successful.
So that’s my small but steadfast global contribution. I think everybody doing a little bit is all that’s made any difference, ever.‘
Producer, Director and Visual Effects Supervisor (2001: A Space Odysee, Blade Runner)
"Trumbull Studios in Massachusetts is dedicated to being green as much as possible, including the use of LED lighting, solar power, and solar laptops. This is not just because our location has limited amperage and no three-phase, we believe we have a responsibility to our community and our planet to be a clean industry.
We are planning for digital photography in 3D 4K at 120 frames per second from remote and inaccessible locations that will not have available power. Solar is the way to go."
Dieter Kosslick, Director Berlin International Film Festival
„The Berlinale is already actively addressing the sustainability subject since years. We appreciate it very much that a growing number of filmmakers, among them this year‘s jury presiden Darren Aranofsky, is following green guidelines on set.“
Benoit Delhomme
Director of Photography (A Most Wanted Man)
‘I never have been told precisely what the rules are for shooting a green movie, but we are trying to do it. This is something new for me. Sometimes people overlight scenes at night. I don’t. If I can see with my own eyes, then it is enough for the film. In that sense I am a green DoP.’
Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons who stars in the Berlinale Competition entry The Night Train To Lisbon is a fan of source segregated recycling. „Especially in Germany you have done a lot for that. You are examplary in the matter of waste separation.“
The Hollywood actor travelled around the world to promote the environmntal documentary feature film Trashed by Candida Brady which deals with the global garbage problem: „We buy it, we bury it, we burn it and then we ignore it“, says Brady. „With Jeremy Irons as our guide, we discover what happens to the billion or so tons of waste that goes unaccounted for each year.“
Since the world premiere at the International Cannes Film Festival in 2012 Trashed picked up various nominations and awards at international festivals.
For the production of Flow, Gints Zilbalodis used the free animation software Blender "A big advantage of Blender is that it is linked to the real-time rendering software Eevee. Blender and Eevee have allowed me to create many variations, try different camera angles and quickly render the shot to see if it works or not," explains the animation artist. "Blender is also good because we can customize a lot. We created a lot of custom tools for Flow. There were some very talented technicians on the team who created special tools for the film that we could customize whenever we wanted."
Produced as a French-Belgian-Latvian co-production with the support of ARTE, Flow already attracted over 350,000 moviegoers in France. in Latvia we did most of the things. The pre-production of Flow as well as the editing, the animatic, the concept art, the post-production, the lighting, the modeling, the colors, and music took place in Latvia, while the sound and the character animation were done in France and Belgium. “I don’t want to work with a huge studio”, emphasizes Gints Zilbalodis, “because I think with a smaller independent project we can tell more personal stories and tell them with more creative techniques and looks and cinematic languages so I want to kind of stay in this independent world.”
Robert Redford
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Hannes Jaenicke
Nic Balthazar
Nadeshda Brennicke, Actress
Darren Aronofsky, Director, Noah / Jury President, 65th Berlin International Film Festival
Tim Bevan
Thekla Reuten
Rachael Joy
Nikola Rakocevi
Nadja Schildknecht
Michael Bully Herbig
Lars Jessen
Helen Hunt
Douglas Trumbull
Dieter Kosslick, Director Berlin International Film Festival
Benoit Delhomme
Jeremy Irons